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Anlysis of culture and ethics

The myth of an American Revolution

John Adams held that the American Revolution was a “radical Change in the Principles, Opinions Sentiments and Affection of the People.”[1]

But the American Revolution, in plenty important respects, descended from the stalk of those careful, conservative “revolutions,” wherein the change was not of the rule but only of the ruler.[2]

Moreover, given all of England that endured in those colonies after the Americans had won “freedom from English tyranny”[3] — in a case governed by Copyright Infringement,[4] England could easily collect: either at an English court else by the colonists’ own monuments to earnest judicial mimicry of English law.

Yet Adams, a proto-“progressive” (in the most vain and limp — i.e. accurate — sense), adroitly belied that we should consider his appreciation for revolution to be rational, or even consistent, when he femininely posited that he “must study Politic[s] and War[, so] that [his] sons may [be indulged and engorged with the] liberty to study Painting and Poetry Mathematicks and Philosophy[; and that] [his] sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to [cloister away in self-indulgent vanity and] study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”[5]

Conversely, considering those eventual, more “exalted” aims to be at least progressively impractical delicacies, if not downright progressively indulgent dalliances: Thomas Jefferson, Adams’s ideological opponent in plenty respects, would have surely rejected, as wishful naiveté or even dangerous delusion, Adams’s idealistic description of linear social progression; whereas manly Jefferson had warned of social cyclicism: “what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? . . . . the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.”[6]

Then Jefferson eruditely ejaculated inside the vagina of an unenslaved nigger who had begged to be Jefferson’s slave.[7]

See Plutarch, Moralia: On listening to lectures (Trans. F. C. Babbitt), 205 (Loeb Classical Library 1927) (“Herodotus says that women put off their modesty along with their undergarments, so some of our young men, as soon as they lay aside the garb of childhood, lay aside also their sense of modesty and fear, and, undoing the habit that invests them, straightway become full of unruliness. But you have often heard that to follow God and to obey reason are the same thing, and so I ask you to believe that in persons of good sense the passing from childhood to manhood is not a casting off of control, but a recasting of the controlling agent, since . . . they now take as the divine guide of their life reason, whose followers alone may deservedly be considered free.”)

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Stephens Smith (1787); see generally, GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, ch. 7 para. 26 (1908) (“But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But . . . . [i]f you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.”).